Madonna once ruled the pop music — and pop culture — world, beginning in 1983 with her string of worldwide hit singles including “Holiday,” “Borderline,” and “Lucky Star,” which firmly established the then-27-year-old entertainer, whose full name is Madonna Louise Ciccone, as an international superstar.

Thanks to her remarkable business ingenuity and uncanny ability to seamlessly update her public image to suit cultural trends, Madonna’s reign on top lasted well into the 21st century. But though she remains a bankable concert attraction, her place at the top of the pop culture pantheon has been supplanted by such younger women as Beyoncé, Kim Kardashian, Lady Gaga and others.

But in her latest series of pictures for Interview Magazine, snapped by high-gloss photographers Mert Alas and Marcus Piggott, Madonna makes one more bid for relevance — baring her breasts in one of the 15 highly-stylized photographs.

Most of the photos in the Interview spread fall into the PG-rated category, however.

To view the entire gallery of 15 photos, visit the Interview site at this link. The gallery includes one bare-breasted photo. The remainder, while somewhat sexually suggestive, feature Madonna in a more fully clothed state.

In the interview, conducted by illusionist David Blaine — as part of the Interview Magazine tradition of celebrities interviewing other celebrities — Madonna discusses her history of drug use.

“It’s about how people take drugs to connect to God or to a higher level of consciousness. I keep saying, ‘Plugging into the matrix.’ If you get high, you can do that, which is why a lot of people drop acid or do drugs, because they want to get closer to God,” Madonna tells Blaine. “I tried everything once, but as soon as I was high, I spent my time drinking tons of water to get it out of my system. As soon as I was high, I was obsessed with flushing it out of me. I was like, Okay, I’m done now.”

Madonna also reveals to Blaine that despite her massive success — she is one of the few entertainers with a net worth of $1 billion or more — she still feels “sad most of the time.”

She also tell Blaine in the magazine interview that she is “very obsessed with death,” due to the death of her own mother when Madonna was only five years old, and this why she has tried everything — because “one has to do as much as possible all the time to get the most out of life.”